ENGL 6310/7310 Popular Culture Studies Fall 2011 PH 300 M 240-540 Dr. David Lavery 12/5/11

1. ENGL 6310/7310 Popular Culture Studies Fall 2011 PH 300 M 240-540 Dr. David Lavery 12/5/11

2. Popular Culture Studies

3. Prehistory • History • Review of Boys Will Be Boys: Critical Approaches to Simon and Simon Popular Culture Studies

4. Angela Hague is Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. The author of Iris Murdoch's Comic Vision and Fiction, Intuition, and Creativity: Studies in Bronte, James, Woolf, and Lessing (forthcoming from Catholic University Press) and co-editor of Deny All Knowledge: Reading The X-Files, she is currently writing a book on alien abduction. Update: An important professor in MTSU’s Honors College, Hague went on to write the widely praised Fiction, Intuition, and Creativity: Studies in Brontë, James, Woolf, and Lessing. . Teleparodist Popular Culture Studies

5. Prehistory (Introduction to Teleparody) • This is parody's mission: it must never be afraid of going too far. If its aim is true, it simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity. • Umberto Eco, "Preface" to Misreadings • “The writing of a novel is a form of the loss of creative liberty. . . . In turn, the reviewing of books is a servitude still less noble. Of the writer one can at least say that he has enslaved himself—by the theme selected. The critic is in a worse position: as the convict is chained to his wheelbarrow, so the reviewer is chained to the work reviewed. The writer loses his freedom in his own book, the critic in another.” • Stanislaw Lem (as quoted by • Stanislaw Lem in A Perfect Vacuum) Popular Culture Studies

6. Every great writer, Borges once noted enigmatically in an essay on Franz Kafka, "creates his precursors" (365). But does every new art form as well? Every new critical form? Whatever the fictions that make up this volume actually are (and even the editors will admit they are not entirely certain, though as a gloss we have thought of them as “prophetic/prophylactic” criticism), they are not without precedent. They have not only cursors/cursers—those colleagues who complained, at a national conference where some of them were presented—that we had “gone too far!” (and by complaining confirmed that, in Eco’s characterization, we were doing parody just right)—but precursors. Popular Culture Studies

7. As parodies, after all, they partake of a long tradition. As early as the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes and the Roman rhetorician Quintillian, parody, a word derived from Greek roots meaning ‘to sing’ and “along side of/subsidiary to,”1 was already considered, in theory and in practice, “pejorative in intent and ridiculing in its ethos or intended response” (Hutcheon 51). Writing in 1962, Gilbert Highet speaks of parody’s range as “amusement, derision, and sometimes scorn” (69). More recently, Linda Hutcheon, in A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (1985), argues for the centrality of parody to Postmodernism: in the age of “the already said” (Eco’s phrase – see the “Afterword” to Name of the Rose), parody— 1 The ambiguous meaning – designating both “beside” and “opposite” – of the root word ‘para’ almost predicts the dual nature of parody as both criticism and homage (Rose 46). Popular Culture Studies

8. derisive, playful, or reverent—has naturally become ubiquitous. Parody, Hutcheon argues, should be thought of as “a form of imitation, but imitation characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the expense of the parodied text” (6). The teleparodies that follow—mostly taking the form of reviews 2—continue parody’s grand tradition, embodying all its inherent contradictions, but they evoke as well a somewhat more esoteric, and more difficult to identify, lineage. 2 Hutcheon quotes W. H. Auden’s wishful thinking – in his concept of a “daydream College for Bards”– that literary criticism, per se, be banned, replaced by ‘the writing of parodies’ as the “only critical exercise required of students” (51). Though by no means poets, our teleparodists all seem to have been schooled in Auden’s academy. Popular Culture Studies

9. If, for example, some of these teleparodies make fabulous use of the footnote and the scholarly commentary as discursive forms, well did not Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire (1962), a “novel” comprised of a 30 page poem followed by 150+ pages of mock-pedantic annotation, pave the way? If our supposedly academic volume taken as a whole strains credulity and fails to pass the “duck test,” it is not the first. In the June 25, 1996 issue of The Village Voice was it not possible to read an announcement of a forthcoming already published tome (assembled by SWISH [The Society for the Withering Investigation of Sports] very much in the same spirit as the present one? Popular Culture Studies

10. Popular Culture Studies Re/bound: Slavery and Liberation in the Work of Dennis Rodman To be published last year by Routledge Table of Contents Lisa Jones, The Afro-American: A History of Hair as Canvas Eugene Genovese, Roll Over Jordan, Roll Over: Defense as an Offensive Trope Stanley Aronowitz, Globe-Trotsky: A Survey of Basketball’s Worldwide Revolution Jacques Derrida, De-Center and Dis-Senter; or Logos and Logos bell “sky” hooks, Madonna and Manchild: Transgression and Aggression in the Theater of Dennis Rodman Francis Fox Piven, Hoop Schemes” The NBA and the Dismantling of the Welfare State Judith Butler, “Naming the Rim: Clarence Thomas, Faye Resnick, and the End(s) of Jurisprudence Slavoj Zizek, Double Dribble: Toward a Politics of the Dopplegänger in the Televisual Realm of Professional American Basketball Tom Frank, City of Big (Tattooed) Shoulders: Licensing, Labor, Layups, and Layoffs

11. Popular Culture Studies • “Essays” for Re/Bound we are told in a concluding whimsical note “must be submitted in accordance with The Chicago Bulls Manual of Style.” • If these pages contain occasional enigmatic references to other non-existents (books, for example, that will not be published for several decades, or futuristic media developments) in a strange loop of interconnecting fictions, they are in good company. For do we not find in Douglas R. Hofstadter’s award-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid an equally loopy, vaguely familiar annotated bibliography entry? • Gebstadter, Egbert R. Copper, Silver, Gold: An Indestructible Metal Alloy. Perth: Acidic Books, 1979. A formidable hodge-podge, turgid and confused—yet remarkably similar to the present work. Professor Gebstadter’s Shandean digressions include some excellent examples of indirect self-reference. Of particular interest is a reference in its well-annotated bibliography to an isomorphic, but imaginary book. (748)

12. If Teleparody’s reviewers have read and critiqued books that are not yet, they imitate genius.3 For has not the impossibly polymathic Polish science fiction mastermind Stanislaw Lem authored two entirely comparable books: A Perfect Vacuum (1971), a collection of “perfect reviews of non-existent books” (books, Lem implies, he had always meant to write but had not gotten around to), and Imaginary Magnitude (1981), prefaces for books that will be written in the 21st century. 4 “Literature to date has told us of fictitious characters,” Lem explains. We shall go further: we shall depict fictitious books.” In such a development Lem discerns “a chance to regain creative liberty, and at the same time 3 Although the precedent I am about to cite is Polish, and more than one of our teleparodists is English, there may be something distinctly American about our enterprise. As the historian Daniel Boorstin has observed, American discourse is characterized by a way of speaking about things in which “what may be is contemplated as though it were in actual of taking place” as if they already existed. Our book dispenses with formalities. 4 “Reviewing non-existent book is not Lem’s invention,” Lem tells us; “we find such experiments not only in a contemporary writer, Jorge Luis Borges (for example his “Investigations of the Writings of Herbert Quaine”), but the idea goes further back—and even Rabelais was not the first to make use of it” (A Perfect Vacuum 3). Popular Culture Studies

13. to wed two opposing spirits—that of the belletrist and that of the critic” (A Perfect Vacuum 4).5 • 5 Elsewhere Lem wonders aloud: • If no philosopher named Schopenhauer had ever existed and if Borges had invented in a story a doctrine called "The World as Will," we would accept this as a bit of fiction, not of the history of philosophy. But of what kind of fiction, indeed? Of fantastic philosophy, because it was published nonassertively. Here is a literature of imaginary ideas, of fictional values, of other civilizations—in a word, the fantasy of the "abstract." (“Todorov’s” 220) • Our teleparodists, we might suggest, are practicing “fantastic criticism.” Popular Culture Studies

14. If these teleparodies play matchmaker to artistic and critical/scholarly impulses through the medium of television, the following nuptials are not the first of their kind. Nor are they the first to blur the boundary between real scholarship and parody. The reader will no doubt recall the grave commotion caused several years back by the publication in the cultural studies journal Social Text of an article (“Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutic of Quantum Gravity”) by NYU physicist Alan D. Sokal. When Sokal subsequently revealed in Lingua Franca that his essay was in fact a parody, a hoax intended to expose the nakedness of postmodern critical emperors, all hell broke loose. Popular Culture Studies

15. Sokal was not the only scholar at play in the 1990s. Lawrence Douglas and Alexander George authored an hilarious put-on called “Freud’s Phonographic Memory and the Case of the Missing Kiddush Cups” (published in Tikkun), a send-up of scholarly discourse that includes a footnote citing an essay by Father Terence McFeely, S. J. entitled “The Mammary of Things Past: What is Beneath Freud’s Slip,” published in The Journal of Genital Theory.” As Douglas explained in a back page piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, their attempt at humor, perfectly recognized by his own mother, who found it hilarious, was subsequently cited with great seriousness by several scholars—possessing tin ears equal to those of Social Text’s editors—who had not gotten the joke. Popular Culture Studies

16. Teleparody, too, has bred some confusion. When this book was in development, the editors posted for a time some of these teleparodies on the web to facilitate editing. One of the internet search engines discovered the otherwise blind site, and a surfer who discovered my own contribution to this book (a review of a book on Baywatch), called attention to the supposed author, a former acquaintance of mine, of one of the essays in that book.6 My colleague, congratulated on his recent publication, e-mailed me to inquire how he had come to publish an essay that he did not remember ever having written. With ease I explained that I had merely appropriated his real name as the fictional author of a make-believe essay in an imaginary book which I was pretending to review. He was not amused, and I removed his name. 6 As the reader will soon discover, our authors sometimes use real names (though only with permission), and sometimes change names to protect the innocent. Popular Culture Studies

17. Nor are we the first to send-up television. Perhaps television lends itself to parody. After all, as Mark Crispin Miller argues, the medium “does not elicit our rapt absorption or hearty agreement, but . . . actually flatters us for the very boredom and distrust which it inspires in us.” Television, in Miller’s deeply cynical view, “solicits each viewer’s allegiance by reflecting back his/her own automatic skepticism toward TV” (194). If TV “derides and conquers” (in Miller’s telling phrase)—if, that is, it is inherently inclined toward self-parody—it is possible that any serious (or mock-serious) consideration of it will seem to be a put-on. 7 Popular Culture Studies

18. I grew up reading the brilliant television parodies in Mad Magazine (recently collected in book form). Today, the always hilarious online humor newspaper The Onion masterfully parodies television scholarship. In one piece, “Report: Mankind’s Knowledge of TV Trivia Doubling Every Three Years,” we learn that research conducted by Rutgers University’s Center for Media Studies indicates that “species familiarity” with television minutiae is rapidly increasing and improving in quality. The Onion quotes Mark Bennett: “It’s no longer all that impressive to know that two different actors played Darrin on Bewitched. . . . To impress these days, you’d have to know that there were two Mrs. Kravitzes. Or two Louise Tates. Or that Jerry Seinfeld was on the first season of Benson.” 7 7 In “Report: TV Helps Build Valuable Looking Skills” we learn (this time from NYU’s Center for Media Studies) that adults “who grew up in homes without television” have “difficulty staring blankly at things for longer than a few seconds.” In fact, they frequently shifted their gaze and focus around the testing environment, often engaging others in the room in conversation and generally making a lot of disruptive noise and movement. Television enriched adults, however, could sit and look at anything: a spot on the ceiling, a fire-alarm box, a stack of magazines on a table. Popular Culture Studies

19. But it hasn’t just been humor zines that have parodied television. In pieces that might well be included in this volume, we find such a major intellectual as the Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco parodying television scholarship in such journalistic pieces as “How to Be a TV Host” and “The Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno.”8 As original as we have tried to be, we too suffer from the anxiety of influence. 8 Bongiorno is an Italian TV celebrity, best known as the host of quiz shows. Popular Culture Studies

20. As Geraghty and Lusted have observed (a passage also quoted by Matt Hills later in this volume): “Criticisms of Television Studies are often based on a confusion between what is studied and the act of studying, and so it is assumed that because some television is sloppy, badly researched and offensive so too is its study” (5). Our anomalous contribution to Television Studies, a book whose genesis was (as my co-editor will explain in the following section) in the (too) serious consideration of bad television, Teleparody was, in a sense, spawned by the very confusion Geraghty and Lusted delineate. Beyond its humble beginnings, however, it became (we hope you will agree) something substantially more. 9 As this book was in development, our colleague Charles Wolfe, perhaps the foremost contemporary scholar of American popular music, passed on to us an essay he had written (but never published) in the late 1960s called ‘Bilko’s Plots and the Bilko Plots: Toward a Structural Definition of Television Situation Comedy’. He thought it might be appropriate. A brilliant exercise in what would eventually be called ‘narratological criticism’, it is, however, anything but a parody and can only be thought of as such because it takes seriously a sit-com high-brow thinking would deem not worthy of another thought. (We have placed Dr. Wolfe’s essay on the Teleparody website. Popular Culture Studies

21. Lawrence Douglas’ perplexing experience with scholarly fiction led him to a surprising conclusion: “For all our savvy and theoretical sophistication, we have lost the capacity to make very simple judgments about a text—such as, for example, whether it claims to be true or intends to make us laugh.” We trust Teleparody will produce no such confusion. Popular Culture Studies

22. Popular Culture Studies Works Cited Begley, Sharon and Adam Rogers.“Morphogenic Field’ Day.” Newsweek 3 June 1996: 37. Bennett, Mark. How to Live a Sitcom Life: A Guide to TV Etiquette. New York: TV Books, 1999. Boorstin, Daniel. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in American Life. 1960. Borges, Jorge Luis. “Kafka and His Predecessors.” Selected Non- Fictions. Ed. Eliot Weinberger. New York: Viking, 1999: 613-15. Douglas, Lawrence and Alexander George. “Freud’s Phonographic Memory and the Case of the Missing Kiddush Cups.” Tikkun January/February 1994: 74-78. ___. “Scholarship as Satire: A Tale of Misapprehension.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 17 May 1996: A56. Eco, Umberto. “How to Be a TV Host.” How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1992: 50-56. ___. “The Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno.” Misreadings. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993: 156-64. Hofstadter, Douglas. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen, 1985. Lavery, David. “Dissertations as Fictions.” College English 31 (1980): 675-79.

23. Works Cited (continued) Lem, Stanislaw. Imaginary Magnitude. Trans. Marc E. Heine. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. ___. A Perfect Vacuum. Trans. Michael Kandel. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. ___. “Todorov’s Fantastic Theory of Literature.” Microworlds. Ed. Franz Rottensteiner. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984: 209-32. Meglin, Nick and John Ficarra. Mad About TV. New York: Mad Books, 1999. Miller, Mark Crispin. “Deride and Conquer.” Watching Television. Ed. Todd Gitlin. A Pantheon Guide to Popular Culture. New York: Pantheon Books, 1987: 183-228. Morris, Edmund. Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. New York: Random House, 1999. Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Vintage, 1962. Rose, Margaret A. Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern. New York: Cambridge, 1993. “Report: Mankind’s Knowledge of TV Trivia Doubling Every Three Years.” The Onion http://onion.com/onion3705/knowledge_of_tv_trivia.html. “Report: TV Helps Build Valuable Looking Skills.” The Onion http://www.theonion.com/onnion3539/looking_skills.html Sokal, Alan D. “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutic of Quantum Gravity.” Social Text 46/47 14.1-2 (1996): 217-52. Popular Culture Studies

24. Popular Culture Studies Yoram Allon, Founder of Wallflower Publishing

25. Rhonda V. Wilcox, Review of Visual Pleasure and Nasal Elevation: A Television Teleology by Taryn P. Cursive-Waters • For over twenty years Laura Mulvey's essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ has been fervently and ubiquitously applied by scholars of the celluloid arts. Her focus on the eye as the center of the viewing experience – through the gaze of character, cameraman, and audience – has served as an explicatorial key for hundreds of authors of hundreds of books and articles on film and television. One such scholar has boldly asked the question: ‘If the eye, why not the nose?’ The resultant work is Visual Pleasure and Nasal Elevation, by Taryn P. Cursive-Waters. Oxford scholar Cursive-Waters has written a work which is eclectic in approach and sweeping in scope. This soon-to-be-seminal text covers applications which are sociological, Freudian, and Lacanian; Jungian, Bakhtinian, and Baudrillardian; of course, Feminist; and, to conclude, she offers an audience study which, in its sheer inventiveness, offers a retroactive construct of the ordered nature of television – in effect, a television teleology. . . Popular Culture Studies

26. Rhonda V. Wilcox is Professor of English at Gordon College in Barnesville, GA. The author of numerous essays on popular culture, she wrote the chapter on television for the forthcoming Handbook of American Popular Culture (Third Edition). With David Lavery, she is the editor of Fighting the Forces: Essays on the Meaning of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Update: Rhonda has continued to work with David Lavery on a variety of projects, including establishment of the Whedon Studies Association and has authored a book on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and co-authored books on Firefly and Serenity and Veronica Mars.. Teleparodist Popular Culture Studies

27. Bill Freind, Review of From Gidget to the End of History: Sally Field and the American Century by James Detourne • As most readers are surely aware, James Di Turno rocketed to fame with the publication of Timmy’s Down the Well, Again: The Life of the Lassies, a metafictional biography/ethnography of the dogs who played Lassie. This text led to the development of what has come to be known as Post-Domestication Studies (or, more pejoratively, Critter Crit). Di Turno quickly became a major force in cultural studies, holding positions at the University of Florida–Key West and the École Normale Mediocre before receiving the prestigious Hanna-Barbera Chair of Media Studies at UCLA. . . .

28. Bill Freind teaches at Providence College. He is currently at work on a book examining the role of history in twentieth century poetry.. Teleparodist Popular Culture Studies

29. Dennis Hall, Review of Equinicity: Contending Discourses in Mister Ed by Jerome Stern • The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt of the 1960s, as Jerome Stern's exhaustively researched and carefully argued study demonstrates, inevitably led to the production and overwhelmingly popular reception of the television series Mister Ed, which aired on CBS from October, 1961, through September, 1965. . . . Popular Culture Studies

30. Dennis Hall teaches English and is a utility infielder at the University of Louisville, who writes pieces on general popular culture and (with M. Thomas Inge) is co-editor of the third edition of The Handbook of American Popular Culture which he desperately hopes will be in your library if not your neighborhood bookstore soon. Although he does not own any pets, he is conspicuously kind to his wife and children. Teleparodist Popular Culture Studies

31. Robert Holtzclaw, Review of Cultural Displacement and the Hegemony of Wealth in The Beverly Hillbillies by Justin Addison • In the summer of 2000, Justin Addison arrived with a splash in the vast, deep ocean of Television Criticism. The occasion was his provocative New Yorker article, ‘Gilligan’s Island: The Blueprint for Survivor’, in which he instigated a national debate with his startling assertion that Mrs. Lovey Howell (the millionaire’s wife) would have won a Survivor-style elimination contest had one been held on the godforsaken island that enveloped the inhabitants of that ill-fated ‘three-hour tour.’ Addison was, of course, mistaken – the innocently cunning Mary Ann would bedevil even the resourceful Professor – but his error in theory did not prevent the article from catapulting him to the forefront of the burgeoning scholarly field of television criticism, particularly the controversial and compelling sub-genre known as ‘Nick-at-Nite-ophilia’: the study of 1960s and 1970s reruns as they intersect with the most significant scholarly issues of the new century. . . Popular Culture Studies

32. Robert Holtzclaw is Associate Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, were he directs the program in Film Studies. Update: Now Professor of English, Bob still directs the minor in film studies and he contributed a chapter on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 to The Essential Cult Reader.. Teleparodist Popular Culture Studies

33. David Lavery, Review of Californication and Cultural Imperialism: Baywatch and the Creation of World Culture, edited by Andrew Anglophone • ‘We live in the age of the Los Angelization of Planet Earth.’ • William Irwin Thompson • The television series Baywatch premiered in 1989 on NBC and was cancelled due to poor ratings. Resurrected in 1991 as an independent, non-network production of All American Television, the series then became, in world wide syndication, the most popular show in the history of the medium, attracting as many as one billion viewers in hundreds of countries around the globe. It aired its final episode in 2001. . . Popular Culture Studies

34. Clifford Mapes, Review of “This is the City-State”: The Idea of the Guardian in the TV LAPDby Xerxes Havelock • With his latest study, ‘This is the City-State’: Republican Guardianship in the TV LAPD, Professor Xerxes Havelock makes another important contribution to the emerging field of applied classicism. Those familiar with this newly-fashionable field of scholarly inquiry will recognize Havelock’s effort to connect the ethical, political, and philosophical narrative structures of classical discourse with the enduring motifs of American popular culture. Applied classicists seek to assert the enduring presence of, in particular, Platonic Idealism and Aristotelian Rationalism in the modern and postmodern venues of late 1960s to late 1980s texts of cinema, drama, and popular media. The central premise of Havelock’s particular strain of applied classicism is that such classical discourses ‘provide a steadying response to countercultural trends and patterns, and so are necessarily engaged to preserve hegemonic values while appearing to lampoon them’ (p. xxi). Popular Culture Studies

35. Clifford Mapes (Professor of English at West Centrix Biotechnical Institute) is a pseudonym for Warren Tormey, who was originally reluctant to have his name connected with this collection. He has, however, come around, and invites any reader to identify all of the baseball references buried in his review. A lifelong fan of the Arizona Diamondbacks, he has two cats: Julius and Thea, and is completing his doctorate at Middle Tennessee State University. Update: Dr. Tormey earned his Ph.D. at MTSU and co-directs a conference on baseball there and co-edits volumes of proceedings from it.. Teleparodist Popular Culture Studies

36. Kevin Kehrwald, Review of Don’t You Be My Neighbor: Dystopian Visions in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood by Victoria Neamo • ‘I got into television because I hated it so.’ • Fred Rogers • In recent years, enough critical attention has been paid to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood to declare the existence of a full-blown school of ‘Rogers Studies.’ Alan Socalled’s My Own Inadequacy: Transgressing the Boundaries of Mister Rogers Neighborhood (1998), Vera Xu’s Boat Shoes and Sweaters: Ontologies of Mister Rogers’ Closet (1999) and Sheila Rosenberg’s The Piano and the Trolley: The Rhizomatic Mister Rogers (2000) have all carved out dynamic fields of Rogers inquiry. The latest in the chorus is an analysis by Victoria Neamo, Professor of Children’s Literature and Media Studies at University of the Prairie in Ramona, South Dakota. Neamo’s critique, entitled Don’t You Be My Neighbor: Dystopian Visions in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, is not merely another exclusive examination of the strange, sterile world of Mr. Rogers, however; it is something of a fascinating meta-study, pondering, as Neamo writes in her preface, ‘Why all the attention to Mr. Rogers now?’ . . . Popular Culture Studies

37. Kevin Kehrwald recently earned the Ph.D. at Purdue University. He teaches film studies at Frostburg State University in Maryland and is the co-editor of Delicious Imaginations: Conversations with Contemporary Writers (Purdue University Press). . Teleparodist Popular Culture Studies

38. Jeremy Brown, Won’t You be My Rhizome?: A Review of The Piano and the Trolley: The Rhizomatic Mister Rogersby Shelia Rosenberg • In her landmark book The Piano and the Trolley: The Rhizomatic Mister Rogers, Dr. Sheila Rosenberg of the University of California at Sunnydale provides the world with a 427-page analysis of the popular TV children's show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Mister Rogers' Neighborhood has been frightening children for more than twenty years, and only with the advent of cable television (thus eliminating the need for children to watch PBS) has the show's insipid influence declined. The show features Mr. Rogers, a kindly man, who apparently sits at home all day and talks to imagined children who are watching him. He has no job and spends his time playing the piano, playing with puppets, and building mildly interesting science projects. . . . Popular Culture Studies

39. Jeremy Brown is a doctoral student in English at Middle Tennessee State University. . Teleparodist Popular Culture Studies

40. WILLOW : Why not? Sheila: Oh, well, identification with mythical icons is perfectly typical of your age group. It's a, a classic adolescent response to the pressures of incipient adulthood. WILLOW : Oh. Is that what it is? Sheila: Of course, I wish you could've identified with something a little less icky, but developmentally speaking... WILLOW : Mom, I'm not an age group. I'm me. Willow group. Sheila: Oh, honey... I understand. WILLOW : No, you don't. Mom, this may be hard for you to accept, but I can do stuff. Nothing bad or dangerous, but I can do spells. Sheila: You think you can, and that's what concerns me. The delusions. WILLOW: Mom, how would you know what I can do? I mean, the last time we had a conversation over three minutes, it was about the patriarchal bias of the Mr. Rogers Show. Sheila: Well, (makes finger quotes) with King Friday lording it over all the lesser puppets...  “Gingerbread,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer 3.11 Popular Culture Studies

41. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Mister Rogers, and Me Sunday, March 25, 2007 Mister Rogers Seeing an image of the late Fred Rogers (1928-2003) on the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences website reminded me that I have meant to record here my two encounters with this gentle, wonderful man. ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

42. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Mister Rogers, and Me Mister Rogers I was on a plane flight in the early eighties from Atlanta to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and was surprised to find Fred Rogers sitting across the aisle from me, but it was not the first time our paths had crossed. ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

43. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Mister Rogers, and Me A decade before I was standing in a bookstore in downtown Pittsburgh (I grew up in Oil City, PA, about fifty miles north of the Steel City), drooling at the most comprehensive collection of books I had ever seen at the time, when behind me I heard an unmistakable voice asking the information desk if the store had "Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel." As luck would have it, I was standing in front of the medieval literature section, and I pulled the book off the shelf and handed it to Mister Rogers. ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

44. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Mister Rogers, and Me Years later, the sketch in Kentucky Fried Movie--at least I think that was the movie (1977)--in which the host of a children's television show pleads with the kids at home to get their parents out of the room so he can read them another chapter of Lady Chatterley's Lover made me remember the moment. Mister Rogers, of course, would never have actually read to visitors to his neighborhood the profane, grotesque masterpiece (written by a French priest) which I handed him that day many years ago. But it says everything about him that he had sought it out as his own essential reading. He was a man of great depth and humanity with the profound gift of seeming profoundly simple and transcendentally kind. Only a deranged academic like Willow's mom would think otherwise. ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

45. Krystal Whitecastle, “Tinky Winky’s got a brand new bag”: The Year's Work in Teletubbies Studies • Since its inception in 1997, Teletubbies studies has attracted its critics, many of whom argue that recent scholarship has failed to maintain the momentum established by Aristotle Anopheles' groundbreaking monograph Tele(ological)tubbies (Athens A&M UP, 1997). To be sure, there have been more lows than highs in recent years, and detractors have been eager to dwell upon the former (e.g. Mary Elizabeth Grace’s disappointing Tinky Winky, I Wuv You! (Scholastic P, 1999) and Timmy Wilson’s intriguing but poorly-executed Po! Laa-Laa! Fall Down Again! (Mother Goose P, 2000)), while overlooking the latter (most notably Gerund Umlaut’s provocative inquiry, Entschuligen Sie, bitte, wie komme ich zum Land Teletubby? (Berlin: die Presse einfältig Universität, 1999)). However, the intellectual vigor and critical sophistication of this year's work in Teletubbies studies should silence even the most skeptical critic of our discipline, for these works act as mental Viagra on minds left flaccid by the puerile criticism of Grace, Wilson, and their ineffectual ilk. . . . Popular Culture Studies

46. “Krystal Whitecastle” (Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Impoverished State University) is the distaff side of Pete McCluskey, Assistant Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, where he teaches classes in Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. . Popular Culture Studies Teleparodist

47. Michael Dunne, Review of Beavis, Butt-head, and Bakhtin by I. B. Todorov • With Beavis, Butt-head, and Bakhtin I[tsy] B[itsy] Todorov continues to pursue the parallel interests in contemporary critical theory and American popular culture that have previously resulted in her controversial studies: Deconstructing Dennis (the Menace) (1992), Signs, Signification, and Sushi (1993), Materializing Madonna (1994), and Fabio and Fabulation (1995). In her newest work – part of Antisocial Texts’ ‘Venting about Video’ series – Todorov applies the probing insights and rich vocabulary of the Russian critical theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) to MTV’s much-analyzed animated/music-video show. The results are (predictably) challenging and irritating. . . . Popular Culture Studies

48. Michael Dunne teaches at Middle Tennessee State University, where he is the co-editor of Studies in Popular Culture. He is the author of numerous articles and three books, Metapop: Self Referentiality in Contemporary American Pop Culture, Hawthorne’s Narrative Strategies, and Intertextual Encounters in American Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture. Update: Michael went on to publish two more books—on Calvinist humor and movie musicals before he retired. . Teleparodist Popular Culture Studies

49. Stephen Tompkins, Review of They Deconstructed South Park, You Bastards! edited by Lavender Levine • First it was Comedy Central's animated ratings' king and darling of the college crowd, then it became a merchandising bonanza, with products ranging from tee shirts to Christmas CD's. Now the naughtiest cartoon in TV history has spawned an anthology of critical essays edited by noted queer theorist and academician, Lavender Levine, and containing articles by such critical luminaries as feminist Sally Rhode and Marxist Gyatra Wetvac. Fasten your theoretical seatbelts, it's going to get a little bumpy. . . . Popular Culture Studies

50. Stephen Tompkins is a doctoral candidate at Lehigh University. . Teleparodist Popular Culture Studies